Seattle Public Library: Design is fun on a grand scale

Updated 10:00 pm, Wednesday, May 19, 2004

Rem Koolhaas' Seattle Central Library hangs its hat with other Seattle audacities, from the Space Needle and the Flash Gordon monorail to Frank Gehry's Experience Music Project and the Fremont Troll.

Rem Koolhaas' Seattle Central Library hangs its hat with other Seattle audacities, from the Space Needle and the Flash Gordon monorail to Frank Gehry's Experience Music Project and the Fremont Troll.

Photo: / Seattle Post-Intelligencer

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Architect Joshua Ramus, photographed on the 10th floor of the new Seattle Public Library on Sunday, May 2, 2004.

Architect Joshua Ramus, photographed on the 10th floor of the new Seattle Public Library on Sunday, May 2, 2004.

Photo: / Seattle Post-Intelligencer

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Work continues on the new downtown Seattle Public Library May 6, 2004.

Work continues on the new downtown Seattle Public Library May 6, 2004.

Photo: / Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Seattle Public Library: Design is fun on a grand scale

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On the outside, the building appears to be crouching. Inside, it leaps to serve you on platforms floating in cocoons of colored light.

Crouching tiger, leaping building: If Rem Koolhaas' new library were a movie, it would come as no surprise, but as a building taking up space in the world, it's amazing. It marries European avant-garde architectural theory to populist, Northwest purposes, and that's just for starters.

Koolhaas' library has high-tech brains and a retro-futurist heart. It is not part of the dare-to-be-dull business core. Instead, it hangs its hat with other Seattle audacities, from the Space Needle and the Flash Gordon monorail to Frank Gehry's Experience Music Project and the Fremont Troll sulking under the Aurora bridge.

Any 5-year-old clutching a transformer robot knows what this building is: Fun on a grand scale. In addition to fun, it's a full service information center that honors the book while beaming us up into technology's embrace.

Aesthetically, the building has a split personality. All the brutal chic is on the outside, its diamond-shaped steel and glass skin stretched over muscle. Had he spotted it from the sky on a dark day, Darth Vader could easily have mistaken it for his personal refueling station.

Inside, the library appears to change its character, starting with the asymmetrical steel skin, which internally is painted a luscious and lulling baby blue. That blue, incidentally, passes for standard industrial primer in Europe.

The shape of the building is eccentric but not arbitrary. It's Koolhaas' innovative response to the library's needs.

The first of those needs is to be noticed. The old downtown library had long ago slid into architectural irrelevance. How can a library that reeks of a conformist past serve as the city's center for intellectual inquiry?

A library needs architectural authority to sell the idea that learning is the culture's hot zone. It has to offer retreats for solitary study and forums for active engagement. Besides books, magazines, tapes and discs, there has to be easy computer access, live research assistance, an auditorium for lectures and performances, pay phones for the cell phoneless and (this being Seattle) coffee at the ready.

All this the new library provides, with space designed to articulate these separate functions, but it offers something else too. From the inside, it provides a flattering view of what's around it, most noticeably on the Fourth Avenue side, where Henry Moore's "Vertebrae" sculpture across the street basks in the frame Koolhaas gives it. Behind the Moore, the Sam Francis painting in the glass lobby of the Bank of America skyscraper finally becomes a focal point, catching the eye of library patrons looking down on it.

The library's odd angling also makes the most of water views as they present themselves in slices through the city's built terrain, and the diamond grid of smart glass will welcome in winter light and screen out the summer's glare.

Open and transparent: views are external and internal. The library is its own kind of landscape, with sweeping vistas floor to floor.

Koolhaas is famous for creative and economical use of prosaic materials. Every one of the 11 floors rewards study. There's aluminum flooring that pays homage to the minimalist floor grids of Carl Andre. The wood is recycled from chipped end pieces and stained a variety of sleek shades. Most of the carpeting is metal thread that can be mopped clean. Then there are the floors that are poured concrete covered in thick layers of polyurethane color. It looks like ice and invites skating.

Pillars with shiny white bases have black, blasted tops, fire insulation sprinkled with glitter. Only in the public plaza areas does the carpet go upscale, with Petra Blaisse's photographs of plant material silk-screened onto the carpet fabric for a high fashion, biology lab effect.

Children have their own library within the library. The seats are dark blue, rubberized pods. The floors are bamboo with large, rubberized circles of hot pink and acid yellow. Kids naturally have their own computer space as well as a mossy green story area under a diagonal support beam. Depending on your point of view, it's either a bunker or a womb.

The world languages section boasts a floor by Ann Hamilton that's a language feast: 11 different kinds of alphabets scored into the wood. Along the wall are language-learning sound booths, with ordinary elevator padding as a permanent kind of wallpaper.

Marcel Proust lined his room with egg cartons to muffle sound. The ceiling on the 11th-floor sports pillows. These puffy squares will save you from yourself should you, in your excitement, start to sing.

Koolhaas loves bright color. The stairways and entrances to public meeting areas are red as Rudolph's nose. The escalators are chartreuse and lit within, so color seems to be coursing up when you're going down and vice versa.

Besides freewheeling asymmetry and color, Koolhaas makes fabulous use of concrete. Massive slabs of it, seamed with small cracks and flushed with tonal variation, seem to chart a kind of geological time.

I didn't love this building as I saw it being built. It reminded me of a giant cheese grater. Once the glass went in and the structure began to reflect the light, the charm of its weirdness won me over.

High-end architecture is often a monument to the architect. Rarely is it art. This library is rooted in its functions, blooms where it's planted, is art in itself and is going to be a huge hit with the mass audience that is its principal customer.